Shrouded Serpent

The toll structure here inverts how unblockable creatures usually work. Rather than guaranteeing damage, it sets a recurring price: every combat the defender either pays to declare blockers or watches four power sail through untouched. That ongoing tax is meant to justify a seven-mana 4/4 body whose stats alone would never carry the cost. The math, though, points the wrong way. A triple-blue commitment buys a creature whose threat scales with the opponent's open mana, and in the kind of long, grinding game blue is built to play, four floating mana late in the turn is rarely a real obstacle. The card is most punishing in a narrow window: early enough that the defender is mana-starved, but that window has long since closed by the time a seven-drop can plausibly land. What lingers is the design idea rather than the execution: an early attempt to price evasion as an ongoing cost paid by the opponent instead of a static keyword stamped on the attacker. Blue would chase that notion again in cheaper, sharper shells, where the toll bites because the attacker arrives while the math still favors it. As a curve-topper, this one asks for a board state the deck wrapped around it was never equipped to produce.